A few physicians in my community began to try concierge medicine in the mid nineties. My first reaction was, “Harley Street has come to Beacon Street”. If you watch Downton Abbey, Lady Mary Crawley probably took her maid, Anna Bates, to Harley Street when they went to...

I have been looking forward to 2016 and asking myself where healthcare should focus in the year ahead. In this connection, Don Berwick’s speech at the 27th Annual IHI Forum had a profound effect on me. You can watch it on YouTube. I appreciated his insightful and...

As a member of the Advisory Council to the Health Policy Commission in Massachusetts, I was very interested in following the internet broadcast of the annual HPC Cost Trends Hearings early in October. At the core of the presentations was a debate about healthcare...

Recently the New England Journal of Medicine published a great article in the “Perspective” section, “The Older Americans Act at 50”. Unfortunately the article is available online only to those who are subscribers, so I will try to give a very brief overview of its...

Lately I have been thinking again about the prescience of one of my most important mentors, Dr. Robert Ebert, who was Dean of Harvard Medical School when I was a student there. In my last blog post I cited a talk Dr. Ebert gave in 1967 at Simmons College, and I...